NCEAS director of informatics research and development, Matthew B. Jones, has assembled an all-star team to conduct a hands-on EcoInformatics workshop for early career scientists at the upcoming annual conference of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in Minneapolis, MN on Sunday, August 4, 2013. Jones will be joined by two others from NCEAS, Mark Schildhauer, director of computing, and Jim Regetz, scientific programmer and analyst. Karthik Ram, quantitative ecologist at UC Berkley and DataONE collaborator, and Carl Boettiger, post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Stock Assessment Research at UC Santa Cruz, will also provide expert instruction at the half-day workshop.

The inherent variability in ecological systems has placed a premium on well-designed studies that employ sophisticated analysis and modeling approaches. These analytical approaches are critically important to understanding and verifying conclusions from these experiments. Although students learn how to acquire and analyze data, recently there has been increasing emphasis on doing so in an open manner that allows for full reproducibility of ecological science. In this workshop, participants will examine the convergence of open data and open source tools and their ability to jointly facilitate open science.

“The purpose of the ESA workshop is to highlight the use of open software tools for conducting open science in ecology. Through hands-on activities, participants will explore the use of the R analytical system for data access from DataONE and rOpenSci,” said Matt Jones. “Learning these open science practices for accessing data, doing basic data manipulation, and publishing derived data and results, is critical to creating open, networked and replicable science.”

Through a series of activities (see http://help.nceas.ucsb.edu/r), participants will learn a variety of approaches to accessing data, conducting basic data assessment, summarization, and visualization using that data. Participants will be exposed to various R libraries available from the rOpenSci project for accessing data, and to the use of R for generating data documentation and archiving data in DataONE-compatible data repositories.

The workshop is appropriate for early-career scientists, including students, postdocs, and faculty that would benefit from new techniques for open science, and for educators who want to incorporate open science concepts in curricula. Participants should have a basic understanding of data analysis and statistics, and preferably basic exposure to the R system. Participants must bring their own laptop to participate in hands-on activities, and must have the ability to install new software.